- Arch Linux ISO snapshot for March 2023, which comes with Linux kernel 6.2 and archinstall 2.5.3, is now available.
- archinstall 2.5.3 comes with an improved disk encryption menu and improved partitioning reliability.
- Developers also warned users about the performance issue at disk selection & disk operations, which is expected to be fixed in the next release.
Arch Linux‘s March 2023 ISO snapshot (2023.03.01) is now generally available and it is the first Arch Linux release with the latest Linux 6.2.1 kernel. The newest release is also coming with the latest version of the archinstall text-mode installer. Arch Linux’s March 2023 is the first release that is powered by Linux kernel 6.2.
Bug fixes and improvements
Arch Linux 2023.03.01 also comes with archinstall 2.5.3 featuring a better disk encryption menu. The Arch Linux team also added translations for Ukrainian, Korean, and Chinese (PRC). The team also warned users about a bug that can cause performance issues. The developer said,
« Disk selection & disk operations will be slow in this release, bare with us until next release when we optimize. The program is not hanging, it’s just slow! We apologize, but it’s in favor of fixing. »
The team also stated that it could be fixed by allowing empty partition information for devices that appear as block devices, but it doesn’t behave like them in the sense of lsblk. Other bug fixes in the release are:
- Updating /etc/vconsole.conf when Installer().mkinitcpio() is called (otherwise mkinitcpio errors out)
- Fixed waiting for archlinux-keyring being properly populated by additional services before installing
And the improvements are:
- Created dataclasses for DiskEncryption and Fido2 with Fido2Device for individual devices
- Improved disk encryption menu (including HSM)
- Introduced get_blockdevice_info to gather information about block devices
- Improved partitioning reliability
- Created a TableMenu object to make it easier to select options out of a table
- Added more translations, Ukrainian, Korean, Chinese (PRC)
The ISO file of the latest version can be downloaded from its official website. Users can also update their existing Arch Linux system with the following command:
sudo pacman -syu